Decolonizing travesti space in Buenos Aires: race, sexuality, and sideways relationality

Abstract

Scholars of space usually neglect the history of travesti populations in Latin America. It is misrepresented not only by disciplinary blind spots but also by global narratives concerned with rehabilitating queer subjects within homonormative projects. Analyzing neoliberal narratives that delink conflicts about racialization and sexuality in Argentina, this article makes room to decolonize the study of travesti experience and embodiment in Buenos Aires's red zone. It examines a network of racialized travestis and their spatial practices, including their migration from the Andean northwest to the sex-work circuits of Buenos Aires. Finally, this article introduces the notion of sideways relationality to account for the cultural and spatial labor that racialized travestis perform at the oppositional margins of homonormative reflexivity.

Descolonizando el espacio travesti en Buenos Aires: raza, sexualidad y relacionalidad de costado

Lxs investigadorxs del espacio comúnmente dejan de lado la historia de las poblaciones travestis en América Latina. La misma está mal representada no sólo debido a los puntos ciegos propios de la disciplina sino también por las narrativas globales que tienden a rehabilitar a los sujetos desviados dentro de los proyectos heteronormativos. Al analizar las narrativas neoliberales que desvinculan los conflictos sobre la racialización y la sexualidad en Argentina, este artículo crea espacio para descolonizar el estudio de la experiencia y la carnalidad travestis en la zona roja de Buenos Aires. Analiza una red de travestis racializadxs y sus prácticas espaciales, incluyendo su migración desde el noroeste andino hacia los circuitos del trabajo sexual en Buenos Aires. Finalmente, este artículo introduce la noción de la relacionalidad de costado para dar cuenta del trabajo cultural y espacial que lxs travestis racializadxs en los márgenes oposicionales de la reflexividad homonormativa.

去殖民化布宜诺斯艾利斯的跨性别空间：种族、性向与侧边相对性

空间专业学者，经常忽略拉丁美洲的跨性别人口的历史。这段历史，不仅被规训的盲点给错误地再现，同时亦受到有关在同性恋常规计画中復兴酷儿主体之全球叙事的错误再现。本文分析在阿根廷中，将种族与性的冲突分离的新自由主义叙事，为布宜诺斯艾利斯的红灯区中的跨性别经验及体现之研究，打开进行去殖民的空间。本文检视种族化的跨性别者的网络，以及他们的空间实践，包含他们从安地斯西北部迁徙至布宜诺斯艾利斯的性工作圈之过程。本文最后引介“侧边相对性”之概念，用来解释将跨性别者的展演，种族化为同性恋常规反身性的反面边缘的文化及空间劳动。

Keywords:

• decoloniality
• travesti
• homonationalism
• homonormativity
• Latin American sexualities

Palabras claves:

• descolonialidad
• travesti
• homonacionalismo
• homonormatividad
• sexualidades Latinoamericanas

关键词::

• 去殖民性
• 跨性别
• 同性恋国族主义
• 同性恋常规
• 酷儿种族

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and Lynda Johnston for their thoughtful suggestions. I am also indebted, for their feedback, to María Lugones, Joshua Price, Bill Haver, the members of the Center for Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture at Binghamton University, and to Laura Elisa Pérez under whose mentorship I completed most of this essay as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. This thinking owes much to networks of travestis, maricas, and jotas/os whose wisdom and practice sustain radical space-making.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

^1. LGTB is an acronym for Lesbian, Gay, Travesti, Transgender, Transsexual, and Bisexual. In Latin America, some community organizations add the category Intersex or Queer to this arch. Shifting acronyms (GLT, G&L, etc.) reflect tensions within this constituency. Travesti is the autonym or endonym used by travestis (Sívori 2005). I translated all original statements from Spanish into English trying to respect class and regional variations.

^2. Fieldwork was carried out in two major sites for network-building: the local ‘gay’ bar in San Salvador de Jujuy and the motel Gondolín located in Buenos Aires's Palermo neighborhood. Travestis run the latter as cooperative. I participated in social gatherings with both populations, attending public protests and hanging out with them. In total, 30 of them participated in my research interviews: six travestis ranging 19- to 45-year olds, six members of a travesti network who do not identify as travestis, and 12 representatives of LGBTQ organizations from Argentina and Bolivia.

^3. Nicolas Shumway (1991, 134 and 135, 164 and 165) examines this boundary within the discourses of Argentina's intelligentsia in the second half of the nineteenth century. The pampas were considered the reservoir of undisciplined gauchos, their unlabored lands, and ignorance. They were pitted against the man from the interior [indigenous from the mountains] and its ‘primitive [barbarie]’ condition.

^4. For the scholarship centered on queer spatiality in the USA, see Bailey and Shabazz (2014), D'Emilio (1992), Halberstam (2005), Herring (2010), and Mumford (1997). In what concerns the Latin and Latina/o Americas, the scholarship is scarce. Neither Murray (1995) nor Balderston and Guy (1997) fill that void. Perlongher (1999) and Rapisardi and Modarelli (2001) should be noted for their spatial approach. Thanks to Lynda Johnston for recommending the work of Grupo de Estudos Territoriais (GETE) in Brazil.

^5. Bayardo and Lacarrieu (1998) study gentrification in the city of Buenos Aires's Palermo, La Boca, and San Telmo quarters.

^6. Mariana Viera Cherro (2011, 352) concurs by stating that the presence of travestis in the media – TV shows, theatre, and magazines – does not translate into ‘reflexivity about being travesti and much less about the homophobia [sic] found in Argentine society’. I think the passage should refer to ‘transphobia.’ She has in mind Flor de la V who in the last decade became a pop-culture darling.

^7. Jujuy's indigenous population represents 10.8% of the state's total while the city of Buenos Aires's remains comparatively low at 2.2% (INDEC 2012). Kollas are the largest indigenous ethnic group in Jujuy. Roughly 50,000 of the country's Kolla population live in the northwestern states of Jujuy and Salta (Instituto Nacional de Asuntos Indígenas), sharing a broader Andean worldview with Aymara and Quechua peoples of the highlands (Occhipinti 2002).

^8. The NYT ignores the rise of the Frente de Liberación Homosexual in the seventies and its ties to socialism (Perlongher 1999; Rapisardi and Modarelli 2011).

^9. Guano (2003) offers a reading of contemporary racial relations in Argentina through a class lens.

^10. Peaking at the turn of the nineteenth century, ‘eugenics’ encompasses positivist disciplines invested in explaining sexual difference as Darwinian types of racial development and deviancy.

^11. The African population was disappeared from the imaginary of the nation in favor of mixtures, Zambos and Mulatos. Yellow fever decimated the Black population of Buenos Aires in the early 1870s (Salessi 1995, 80 and 81).

^12. Sexual panic points to narratives of fear and anxiety delineating boundaries between good and evil as they relate to a sexual community of certain sexual practice(s) (Patton 2005; Rubin 2002).

^13. Lunfardo is a slang developed by criminals in the late nineteenth century. It was created to remain unintelligible before policemen and prison-guards, combining the Italian dialect ‘Lombardo,’ brought to the port of Buenos Aires by immigrants, with elements from Quechua and African languages and Gaucho speech.

^14. Also known as Comuna 14, Palermo was founded in the late sixteenth century but its famous green areas [los bosques] were developed after 1852. Being close to the port, it grew with waves of immigration from mainly Spain and Italy but also Armenia, Lebanon, and Poland. The sex district is located in Los Bosques.

^15. Travestis have worked in coalition with street vendors and an organization of female sexual workers (AMMAR, Asociación de Mujeres Meretrices de Argentina en Acción por Nuestros Derechos).

^16. As far as ethnographies are concerned, the more substantive accounts of the interweaving of racialization, indigeneity, and sexuality are Decena (Tacit Subjects),Stephen (‘Sexualities and Genders’) and Prieur (Mema's House). Other ethnographies lacking an understanding of the co-production of race and sexuality are Sívori (2005), Fernandez (2004), and Núñez Noriega (1999).

^17. A collective of travestis together with members of the Area Queer at the University of Buenos Aires conducted workshops on civil and human rights with the travesti population in the red zone. Their surveys provide an estimate on their ethnic and geographic origins.

^18. Philosopher Enrique Dussel (2006) has framed an ethics of transcultural communication under the notion of transversality. Unlike his approach focusing mainly on avant-guard intellectuals, this piece bears witness of transversalidad among racialized travestis who excel as intellectuals in their own right.

^19. Such as the decade-long quarrel that travestis maintain against a powerful faction of the G&L movement friendly to the idea of turning the pride parade into entertainment (fieldwork notes June 2003).

^20. ‘Picketers’ [piqueteros] refers to a collective identity within Argentina shaped in the second half of the 1990s. They protested the spike of unemployment rates under neoliberal regulations. Their strategy was to block highways for weeks at a time by setting up pickets and demanding employment programs and public services (Dinerstein 2010).

^21. In the case of travestis, criminalization is attached to their labor. For a critique of neoliberalism and its sexual politics, see Duggan (2003, XX) and Sabsay (2011, 32).

^22. Interviews with Lohana Berkins (ALITT), Mónica León (Hotel Gondolín), and members of the Area Queer de la Universidad de Buenos Aires. See also one of Berkins's published speeches (Fernandez, D'Uva, and Viturro 2002).

^23. Section 81 of Buenos Aires's city code sanctions sexual solicitation. Based on an analysis by former city council Diana Maffia, the city filed 7470 cases for alleged violations of Section 81.

^24. For another compelling critique of Kulick's findings, see ‘Espaço Interdito’ (Silva 2013, 148 and 149).

^25. Ana Paula's life story is analyzed thoroughly in my book manuscript Sideways Selves: Passion and Space across the Latina/o and Latin Americas.

^26. See also Carlos Decena's Tacit Subjects (2011) for its groundbreaking critique of westernizing gay visibility.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Pedro José Javier Di Pietro

Pedro DiPietro is Assistant Professor in the Department of Women's and Gender Studies at Syracuse University. He works at the intersection of decolonial feminisms, women of color thought, and critical theories of race and sexuality.